Psychosis: Bending Reality to See Around the Corners | Paul Fletcher | TEDxCambridgeUniversity

Giving me a lot of opportunities to discuss these ideas with artists. An example of this was when I was placed with author, playwright and filmmaker Julian Simpson, who on several occasions addressed the idea of ​​the mind and its attempt to construct a

reality

from sensory information. As a result of this discussion and collaboration, although I cannot claim any credit for it, a play he wrote called A State of Turmoil won several BBC Drama Awards. The other collaboration that Wellcome encouraged me to do that I never expected was with a video game design company, and they approached me because they wanted to make a video game about an 8th century Celtic warrior who had had some psychotic experiences.

Well, at first I was skeptical, but after meeting them it became clear to me that they were trying, in a very respectful, sincere and honest way, to take advantage of some of these experiences. So, we met several times with the wonderful team (Recovery East), led by the great (Tracey Bartlett), and the team is made up of a group of people who have suffered experiences of mental illness and who are working towards a treatment and, in fact, several cases have been treated. They were kind, generous, and brave enough to talk about their experiences with me and the Ninja Theory team.

As a result, the game was developed around his experiences and Ninja Theory gave me a clip from the movie that I would like to leave you with. This video is of the game itself and some sounds were created based on discussions we had. (Video) (Man) is a coward. (Woman) They are coming. (man) coward. coward. (Woman) They are coming. They are coming. (various voices) They're watching. They are looking. They are looking. (Sometimes the world appears as a bunch of different geometric shapes. It's cool.) (Various voices) Get out! Go out. Go out. Outside! Go out. Get out of here.

Get out of here. Go out. Get out of here. Exit (end of video) There's still a lot of work to do, but I hope you come away with the impression, which I'm trying to give, that talented artists can say a lot about this in two minutes that I can't. say in a whole series of conferences. So thank you very much (Applause)